Comment by troupo

> - Those events do happen today exactly as described and nobody dies.

Ah yes, the great counterargument of "nobody dies".

> I'm not sure why those trips would starve the system,

"I'm not sure why huge surge in demand in one part of the system would not starve other parts of the system."

> or why companies would not have idle cars lying around "in case of events".

Because companies are not in the business of having huge fleets of expensive hardware just sitting in extra rented garage space just for these occasions.

> over a longer window there's no reason to believe that companies would essentially leave money on the table by not having a larger fleet,

Why would they care when there's no public transportation to speak of, and all are stuck with their fleets of cars, as you so desire?

> - In cities I've lived in, people don't just leave work exactly at 5pm like robots and immediately congest the roadways.

That's why it's called peak hour, not peak millisecond. Just one more lane, and a a few hundred thousand cars on the road should fix all problems.

> This is a parallel concern, but why is a company like Spotify of all things not fully remote?

This is an irrelevant concern because Spotify was just an example of a company having an office in the center of the city. One of hundreds of such companies, with thousands of people.

> Buses are also cars that don't require additional infrastructure to carry more people

Keywords: busses, more people.

> My point was that nobody ever argues those things because they're the worst parts of public mass transit

You either argue for busses, as above, or complain about "oh my god I need to sit with some strangers in the same place" and "oh my gid it's inconvenient to plan a trip with more than one stop".

Yes, that's about the extent of the arguments. And yes, that's why it's invariably Americans who cannot even begin to conceive other modes of transportation.